In today's episode, we sit down with John DeLong, the agency's director of compliance. It's a particularly interesting discussion about the development of NSA's compliance program, its history, and also why it does not seem to reassure more people that the agency is acting within the law. To what extent, we discussed with DeLong, is the problem compliance with the rules, and to what extent is the problem the substance of the rules themselves? DeLong is a particularly thoughtful and eloquent guy, and the conversations will interest, we suspect, even those who think the NSA completely lawless. At a minimum, it should offer those who think the agency has gone rogue a window into how and why the agency sees itself as minutely regulated.

The complete series, in addition to today's episode, includes five interviews:

Benjamin Wittes is editor in chief of Lawfare and a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of several books and is co-chair of the Hoover Institution's Working Group on National Security, Technology, and Law.